


Bitter Fruits

by themadlurker



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-01
Updated: 2009-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-08 05:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themadlurker/pseuds/themadlurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Married life, fatherhood, and divorce: the family life of Dr. Leonard McCoy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bitter Fruits

They're young and stupid in love. Getting offered shares on a new mining colony isn't either one's idea of newlywed bliss, but they're young enough to think it's an adventure and they'll take whatever start they can get. Leonard barely makes it out of medical school and Jocelyn scrapes together a business degree only to have her uncle declare that they've no business getting married unless they can pull their careers together first.

_"He's a complete hypocrite," Jocelyn whispers into Leonard's ear one night as he mouths kisses along her clavicle. "He was single until he 'got his start' on his mother's business conglomerate because no one would have him until then."_

Her other uncle, actually her second cousin once removed, is a much more reasonable man. From the poor side of her father's less-than-impressive family, he was born on an agricultural colony and he knows that no one survives without help, and he's the one who offers to buy them into a new mining cooperative in the outer sectors. Leonard's a bit queasy about space travel (perils of paying attention during those xenobiological virology seminars), but Jocelyn tells him not to be a baby and something about the way her hand works its way down his abdomen as she says it makes him oddly inclined to listen.

Queasiness gives way to necessity in the end, because neither of them can find work on Earth without the benefit of nepotism. Any number of Jocelyn's relatives could probably find them jobs with a snap of the fingers, but the more affluent members of her family have always had a singular obsession with being "self-made men" (or women). The Federation has no such qualms, and in exchange for establishing a new source of duridium ore in the Ventaris sector, the department of colonization promises to provide assistance as needed. There are advantages, after all, to a job that nobody wants.

Another of Jocelyn's cousins, who works for one of the larger shipping companies, got his start working on the Delta Orosi mining colony, and he pays their passage out as a wedding gift. First-class tickets would be indulgent, of course, so their transport takes the "scenic" route, on which they see mostly stars and waystations.

Leonard gets sick two weeks in and can't wait for the "honeymoon" to be over.

He feels even worse, though, when they arrive, and he finds that not only is he the only doctor on Beta Arturi, not only have the medical supplies not arrived yet, but the housing materials have only just come on the same slow transport. Jocelyn takes a long look at her husband, who's doubled over retching onto an empty patch of ground and marches off to the only construction in sight: a standard-issue Starfleet "relief" shelter. When she comes back, it's with a cot and three miners who help her put together emergency shelter for the new arrivals while Leonard lies curled up in a ball of agony. He only finds out later that she had practically yanked the cot out from the slumbering camp overseer and set him to doing an inventory of supplies.

There are only twenty of them there that first night: a few who'd been part of the original prospecting team, the rest fresh off the transport. Somebody tries to leave Jocelyn a shelter just for her and Leonard, but she points out that four rather than six to a cramped shelter may be the difference between discomfort and homicide. Another couple helps her to carry her husband and their bags back to the shelter, and then the three of them keep Leonard's mind off his stomach cramps by telling horror stories about space disasters. Leonard stays in his cot for two more weeks until the nausea fades enough for him to crawl out and start sorting through the medical supplies. A few more have arrived in those eeks. Some were there to begin with, but mislabelled as "waste disposal components." Everyone's very relieved when they find the real waste disposal components and set up a working toilet.

By now Jocelyn knows everyone and everyone knows Leonard as "Josie's husband, the one who gets space sick." He almost has them convinced that it was nothing more than a knock-down, drag-out virus until he loses it on a survey flight. After that there isn't a pilot on the planet who will take him aboard without a joke and a sick-bag.

He finds this increasingly hilarious.

Jocelyn works her ass off that first year, and so does he. They alternate time on the comm system yelling at various Federation bureaucrats about problems with quotas and shipping lines. He's never loved her more than at the moment when she makes a senior dispensary agent quiver and turn green and their "non-necessary nutritional supplements" shipment gets doubled. They sneak off as soon as they can with a stasis chamber of apples and use them to do extremely wicked things to each other.

* * *

Eighteen months in Jocelyn gets pregnant, and after a long discussion about the timing, about prospects and security (about "the likelihood that the whole damn place will collapse around us before the kid's born"), they decide not to wait for joy if that can make it now. They're still only halfway to a more permanent home (two rooms, projecting off the kitchen/dining/bath of the "temporary" shelter), but until now neither of them has thought of it as a priority. Then one day Leonard finds himself getting dragged away from work by Jill and Meena and much to his surprise the three of them have the bulk of the structural work done before Jocelyn returns from her tour of the new north mining site. Leonard surveys the newly assembled rooms in bewilderment, wondering why this had seemed like such a monumental task.

Meena claps him on the arm on her way out, saying, "You're stuck with us now, neighbour."

Leonard can hear their voices retreating — shut out a little more effectively by the new walls — and does feel a little stuck. Not by Jill and Meena's presence — the couple make excellent neighbours — but it's not quite what he pictured as their first home. The temporary shelter was fine for the two of them, if not for an infant, and it made the reassuring statement that they were passing through on the way to better things. Now Leonard finds himself wondering how many more years he'll be looking at the Federation-standard grey of these walls.

"Leonard!" Jocelyn exclaims, startling him out of his reverie. "How did — when did you do all this?"

From the light that's filtering through the tarp overhead, Leonard realizes he must have been staring at a blank wall for over an hour. Jocelyn is rapt with surprise and excitement, her expression lit up as she wanders from room to room, sketching the outlines of a bed, a table, a desk, as she goes. Each room seems less empty once she's passed through, as if she's left behind the foretraces of habitation. When she finally stops in the nursery, fingers trailing over an imaginary crib rail, Leonard finds himself laughing at the picture she makes, his visionary wife, looking at things that don't exist yet, her very present and heavy satchel forgotten on her shoulder. With an apologetic kiss to the back of her neck, he brings her back to the present by easing the bag off to the ground.

"It's a start, anyway," he says, looking at the place where their son or daughter will sleep.

Her concentration broken, though, Jocelyn seems to remember her travel-worn state.

"The shower?" she asks, almost plaintively.

"Ready as soon as you install it, darling. I didn't think your love for me would withstand my attempts to tinker with the engineering."

Her laugh vibrates against his chest.

"Oh, I don't know, Leonard. I've always felt special about having the only shower that got installed in the kitchen instead of the bath."

A few weeks later, Jocelyn moves the shower unit into the new bathroom and Leonard begins replacing the tarp with proper roofing. The rest of the work gets done in bits and pieces as the two find time for it. Long after her coworkers have argued her into taking "time off" in the last trimester, Jocelyn is still hard at work on the faulty energy recycling system in their new home.

Their neighbours help with the last of the construction, too, and Jocelyn stands there with gritted teeth watching them get the last of the roof in before she asks everyone, politely, to leave, because she's having a baby now. Someone tries to steer her toward the clinic, which Leonard absolutely vetoes because he knows how much antiseptic they don't get, and how many cases of Bolian earache they do. He turfs out the nurse when he arrives, too, and Joanna Treadway McCoy is born to the sound of her mother screaming, her father cursing, and both of them laughing like mad.

A constant stream of gifts for the baby make their way into Leonard's hands during his shifts at the clinic, where he's still the only doctor, and the only nurse is that kid, barely 20, who's still figuring out how to hold a scanner. Paternity leave has to wait for almost six months, when they find someone from Starfleet medical to take over his job as a temporary posting. Dr. Rollins is smart, cynical, and the minute she gets a look at their "medical facilities" she starts in on a pile of requisition forms that get them better outfitted in a month than Leonard has managed in the last 3 years. Jocelyn stops taking Joanna with her on tours of the ore-processing plants, and Leonard stops having nightmares about refinery accidents.

* * *

"You know, if we were living in a place with proper daycare..." Leonard mutters to Joanna, as he digs his way through the paperwork Dr. Rollins' left as a legacy of her tenure. Dr. Rollins' powers over requisition forms are apparently non-transferable, though, or so Leonard has learned from the meagre results of his own imitative efforts. "Did you enjoy the shuttle flight with your mother yesterday? Lee said you did better than me my first time out, but that could just mean you kept it in the sick bag."

"She didn't need the sick bag at all, actually." Jocelyn appears behind him, standing with arms folded, but an indulgent look on her face. "Stop trying to transmit your phobias to our daughter."

"It's not a phobia if it's thoroughly justified and you know those shuttles aren't what you'd call top of the line."

"Well, since Joanna doesn't seem to share your thoroughly rational paranoia, maybe she'd like to come visit the north site with mommy tomorrow?"

Leonard huffs, but just says, "If you have any concern for my blood pressure, Josie, you'll leave Jo with me any time you're walking into a potential refinery accident."

"All right, then. As long as she's not a bother here."

"She's an angel," Leonard insists as Joanna makes a desperate bid for escape via her crib railing.

"Well, at least get the office properly child-proofed, then," Jocelyn says as she extricates their daughter from an improvised pulley system of blankets. "She's getting a little too good at climbing to be left alone near all this medical equipment." But she stops suggesting that Joanna come along for anything more hazardous than office work.

It's not so long after that when they really do have a refinery accident and suddenly Leonard finds himself getting more training than he ever wanted in triage. Jocelyn isn't among the wounded, and Leonard's hands won't stop shaking until one of the rescue workers pulls him aside and tells him that she's fine. It turns out she's been on site the whole time, organizing the rescue effort, yelling at the foreman, and breaking all sorts of regulations about radiation management in favour of getting people out as fast as she can. Leonard breathes for what feels like the first time, picks up a scanner and gets to work. When he finally finishes, he finds Jocelyn standing quietly at the door, watching him in silence. Leonard does his best to wash away the smell of burning as Jocelyn makes her way past him to the small office where Joanna has somehow fallen asleep despite the noise and panic of the clinic. Leonard finds Jocelyn standing over the crib with a strange, blank look on her face, and he lets their fingers brush together as they watch their daughter's chest slowly rise and fall.

* * *

"Have you thought about interviewing at Aiera?" he asks her one night over bowls of B57 soup.

"What, the mining conglom?" She seems surprised at the question, though the topic has been coming up frequently around the colony since the company announced its plans to move into the sector.

Leonard shrugs. "They must be taking on management as well as workers. Maybe even medical staff."

"Maybe," she agrees. "I'm not sure, though... well, I've been encouraging workers to stay here, even if they get an offer."

"Are you really that hard-pressed for workers out here? I thought you'd been passing extra labour on to other sites."

"It's not that, it's just — I'm not sure that type of company is a very good prospect."

"But didn't your uncle make a fortune working for a company like that?"

"He _founded_ a company a bit like them, yes. And he did pretty well off it. I'm just not sure — it's not something we've ever talked about, really — I mean, I didn't understand until I started overseeing actual costs and expenditures — but... I don't think anyone else who worked for that company could have done very well."

Leonard doesn't know quite what to say about that, because he's suddenly realized that he can't remember the last time Jocelyn sent a message to that uncle or vice versa. He keeps half an ear turned to gossip, though, about who's moving on to company life, until half a year later some of those people start trickling back into Jocelyn's office, asking for their old jobs back. After that, when he overhears talk of job opportunities with some mining company or another, he trusts to Jocelyn's judgement, and starts thinking instead about the larger mining colonies — maybe for when Joanna needs a school, not a daycare.

At three, Joanna McCoy is queen of the world and knows it. Jocelyn and Leonard have given up on anything short of complete lockdown to keep Joanna in the house and have learned to trust almost as much as their daughter does that anyone she comes across within her toddling radius will pick her up, give her something good to eat, and deposit her back with one of her parents. In reward, she supplies her finder with an endless stream of humorous babble about Bobo the space elephant and what colour her socks are today. She's 5 years old by the time she has any competition for listeners, and when it arrives, she is wonder-struck by the 11-yr old Cristoph.

Cristoph is a whole foot taller than her and he's going to be a pilot someday and he knows _just absolutely everything_ about ships, but he still listens seriously when she talks about her favourite rocks and places to hide.

Jocelyn has been trying for seven years to make the colony an independent community rather than a stopping point for workers who move from one operation to the next. The arrival of another family is a testament to her success, but Leonard worries about what it implies. Ever since Joanna was born he's been telling himself that they would be moving on to better jobs elsewhere — maybe somewhere closer to home — before it was time for Joanna to go to school. But Cristoph's aunt has been teaching him between cargo ships and colonies for years; she offers to teach Joanna as well, during the afternoon, and things settle into a pattern that looks distressingly like the long term. Jocelyn is exultant.

Four more families move to Beta Arturi in the next year; profits from the colony are up enough to attract some prospectors with real skill. No longer do they rely on the vagaries of Federation shipments to keep themselves running. One or two independent traders even find it worth their while to add Beta Arturi to their routes. They may always rely on the Federation, but they have gained a measure of economic independence.

This blessing quickly becomes a curse as some of the extraction equipment breaks down, and the remaining site, a cache that had looked promising, turns out to be highly porous and too contaminated to process on-world. They have no off-world facilities and no one wants to buy the ore raw.; Reserves drop steadily and quickly; by the winter Jocelyn is spending most of her time on the comm system demanding a definition of "extreme distress" from more Federation bureaucrats. They get through it, though: partly by yelling, partly with the help of one or two contactsthey've made on nearby mining colonies, but mostly on the luck of a sudden shortage that makes their stockpile of tainted ore enough to bargain for a few months' subsistence.

Leonard thinks of it mostly as Jocelyn's fight. She's now director of operations for the main mining site; she's the one the colonists listen to and she knows just how to harangue them into patience or creativity when she needs to. Leonard is happy to sit back and simply offer his reassurance and support.

That all changes on the day he catches Joanna saving partly eaten emergency rations behind her bed. She's heard people talking about food shortages and taken it to mean all the food's going to disappear, not just the good stuff or the fresh stuff. That night he sits up long after she's comforted and fallen asleep, and he cries the bitterest tears of his life with a wrapper crushed in his hand.

The next morning, he turns the sharpness of his tongue to greater effect than he ever did during those first weeks of disappointment with the colony. A series of essays, "on the home front" and "dark frontiers" make it into popular circulation and greatly embarrass the Federation's department of colonization. No one figures out who J. M. Tyrell is, but if they did, Leonard doubts he'd ever have a friendly word from a Starfleet officer again. Not that he can bring himself to worry much about the few of them he's used to seeing — they already scowl when they're diverted from their course to visit the colony. Strangely enough, even Jocelyn goes on a tirade against this "arrogant, condescending busybody who thinks he knows everything about the 'marginal' worlds, but has probably never set foot off of Earth in his whole life."

Leonard doesn't care. A majorscience mission gets scrapped in favour of "re-affirming the dedication of the Federation to the support and assistance of colony worlds." Joanna forgets about her secret hoard and Leonard doesn't give a damn about the Antares sector.

He doesn't think much about the essays after that, though he can't help bringing them up one evening, when Jocelyn's just had a long day arguing with a Starfleet quartermaster, and he thinks she'll be in the right mood for a good rant about Federation policies. Instead, she just snaps at him.

"God, Len, you can be so — so _stupid_ sometimes. You think this is all about Federation rationing?"

"Considering that's where we get most of our supplies, yeah, I thought there was a connection."

"Well, it's not. It's about politics and some of the idiot things happening on the other colonies, and — oh, what do you care about it anyway? You just want to get _nostalgic_ about yelling at bureaucrats."

"Josie, that's _not_ fair."

"Isn't it, Lenny? When's the last time you got involved outside the clinic?"

Leonard can't think of a thing to say to that — short of claiming authorship of the essays, which he's pretty sure would make things worse. It doesn't seem to matter, though, because Jocelyn deflates a little after a heavy moment of silence.

"Look, just don't expect me to be patient after I've had a shit day. I'll explain some of the stupid things I've been dealing with to you later."

Except she never does, in so many words. From bits and pieces of rants and her never-ending flood of plans, Leonard picks up probably more about what's happening on Beta Arturi than anyone not directly involved in its management. For all that, it's strange, nebulous, a realm of never-ceasing negotiations that Leonard doesn't have a part in anymore, beyond what directly affects his clinic or their family.

* * *

It's about a year later when two of the other founding colonists take what they've managed to save and head for a more affluent colony. Jocelyn and Leonard pore over their personal finances, reckon their savings, and when they come up short Jocelyn's uncle comes through with just enough extra funds to buy out the shares of the departing colonists. Jocelyn now owns the main refinery, and the other directors consult her as the main authority on Beta Arturi business.

"Did you ever think about following their example?" Leonard asks her after she gets back from a three-week tour of all their facilities.

"Hmm? Whose."

"José and Erin — did you ever think about selling up and leaving? I mean, I was a bit surprised your uncle didn't tell you to instead of helping you buy into more of the place."

Jocelyn's shoulders curl in a bit. It's funny how the gesture reminds him of Joanna, when she's feeling uncertain. It's backward, somehow. Surely Joanna should remind him of her mother?

"He mentioned it. I just didn't... Look, what I told you about — about his mining company..."

Leonard struggles to understand the connection.

"You're saying... he did want you to sell out, then?"

"No!" Jocelyn exlaims, a bit defensively. "I mean... I just think — he sees things differently, is all. He never actually lived on the colonies, he was never on-hand for operations."

"You mean he didn't give a damn," says Leonard, slowly, "whether we stayed here or not?"

It's answer enough that Jocelyn doesn't protest; she's never hesitated to defend someone she believes in.

At last she says, very quietly, "I don't think he knows how hard I worked to keep this place together, Len. And... I'm not a sell out. I can't be."

Even as he hugs her, he can't help wondering how much her uncle had it right — when he sees how much this life has cost them, and wonders, feeling like a traitor to Jocelyn's certainty — how much easier it might have been to leave with the others and let the colony find someone else to fight for it.

* * *

Ore prices do rise again, eventually, and if Leonard still thinks about moving on, it's easy to get caught up in Jocelyn's plans right here.

There are enough children for a school now, run out of one of the public buildings. Cristoph's aunt, Aleena, still teaches half-days, and whoever can be spared minds the children and teaches whatever they know the rest of the time. More families move to Beta Arturi and they get a seat on a local trading council. N'van Fahren attends meetings off-world every few weeks and eventually brings back membership in the Unified Outlying Miners' association. It's a good time on the colonies. They manage to push up ore prices in the sector even as Starfleet drags profits down with extensive requisition orders, even when the ore they requisition gets passed along to independent worlds at half-price as an incentive to cooperate with the Federation.

Joanna thrives. She absorbs the optimism of the colony, her smiling face and easy chatter with the other children advertising it to any off-worlders who visit. She is endlessly curious about strangers, equally unafraid of shuttle craft and alien species. Her favourite use for her father is to beg to be taken to the main landing strip, where she can watch for ships and greet the arrivals. On quiet days, she leads the other children in daring adventures outside the ore facilities. Joanna likes nothing better than being an authority on colony happenings, and to that end she breaks into (or simply breaks) every lock and access panel on the main compound in search of secrets. McCoy coaxes her into the clinic whenever he can, liking to keep her close and safely occupied in his office, although he eventually finds she is safer when occupied by medical equipment than when left alone with a computer.

Joanna seems remarkably resistant to the various strains of miner's flu that make their way regularly across the colonies, so administering the antivirals is a wonderful sort of joke for her: here, watch daddy press the button and make Varin stop those funny snuffling noises. Sometimes McCoy lets her play doctor and pick out the right analgesic for a patient: red for fevers, blue for swollen throats, green for the ones who walk straight through the clinic to the toilet. She also learns a surprising patience for a child, able to stay quiet and out of the way when worse cases come in and McCoy has to wave her off with a tense look on his face. The other times, her slightly crooked smile and easy babble seem to soothe his patients' nerves, not to mention his own.

He never regrets her presence, except the once, when Cristoph brings his aunt into the clinic, nearly doubled over with pain, and McCoy has to let his daughter hear her best friend screaming at him for a syndrome he can't fix, no, not even if they had all the medicine in the Federation. Joanna hovers in the background, fidgeting and retreating in on herself in a way that reminds McCoy, horribly, of the way she used to sometimes sit at the dinner table, fingers playing nervously with the last of her food.

Jocelyn is furious when she finds that Leonard has been keeping Aleena's condition a secret, no matter how many times he repeats the word "confidentiality." Leonard for his part can't believe how quickly she begins talking about finding another teacher until he sees the way she keeps glancing over at Joanna, and he snaps, "For god's sake, Josie, it's not _contagious_." Jocelyn looks at him sharply and asks if he's an expert on the effects of grief, which makes Leonard wince because he's seen the forepangs on their daughter's face as well.

"Still," Jocelyn says, "you're right about one thing. I have no business going behind Aleena's back."

She waits until Aleena is at home again, sitting up in bed and swatting at her nephew as he fusses around her, to ask straightforwardly if Aleena needs help teaching the children. Aleena barks a laugh at this, then coughs, and says, "You may as well get the next saint lined up to teach these hellions, Jocelyn. Though God knows where you'll find another patient soul willing to take the job."

Jocelyn sort of smiles and says that, if Aleena is feeling particularly holy, one of her students would like to visit her favourite teacher. Leonard fetches Joanna from where she stands outside scuffing at the dirt with her toe, and leads her through the old schoolroom. She walks eagerly over to the bed, but gives Cristoph a wide berth, Cristoph her friend who has become very large and frightening, even as he sits quietly nearby. He doesn't seem to notice her presence.

"Come, now, Jocelyn, I thought you'd promised me a hellion, and here I see you've brought me one of my best pupils," and chattering like this, the teacher gives more comfort to her young visitor than it seems fair to ask. Leonard's heart glows for Aleena Doros as he sees his daughter smile a little and forget her unease with Cristoph. None of it can make the end easier, but Leonard promises himself that when the day comes, Joanna will be safely at home and away from things she should not see.

* * *

The new teacher seems to arrive incredibly soon, which Leonard forces himself to remember is a testament, not to a lack of feeling, but to a practicality that Jocelyn has been forced to develop just as he has himself. Joanna and the other children take quickly to the new teacher and the whiff of excitement and novelty he brings with him. Only Cristoph does not return to school, choosing first to care for his aunt at home, and then to find a job in one of the off-world refineries now controlled by Beta Arturi. Jocelyn gets Cristoph his interview with the refinery's managing owner, spending one of the many favours she has accumulated. She's the one who arranged the take-over when the economy of two neighbouring colonies collapsed. Since then, Beta Arturi has become the central world for the sector, managing the remaining extraction sites and processing stations on nearby planets. A job for Cristoph is the least of what people would do for her.

When Leonard questions the wisdom of having a bright boy start on such a hard career, Jocelyn asks him how much older they were when they chose Arturi for their home.

"Besides, just what do you expect him to _do_ otherwise? You know he's already passed most of the tests he'd need for a good school if he could afford to go. Maybe he'll be able to afford that for himself some day, but for now the community's done all it can."

Leonard takes this to mean that Jocelyn's done all she can, but it doesn't incline him to accept this fate for Cristoph. He writes to an old friend who now teaches at Starfleet medical about a bright young man who knows how to calculate trajectories and fly shuttles with half their panels falling off. His friend writes back with an offer to sponsor Cristoph's application to Starfleet.

Jocelyn is furious. It's no secret that Starfleet operations have taken priority for years over anything on the colony worlds "until the current conflict is ended." It's also no secret that over those years casualty reports filtered back to families and friends from the vague and wavering front line. Leonard doesn't lie about any of this when he speaks to Cristoph, but he can't criticize the boy for choosing the bolder option.

It's also no secret that Jocelyn blames Leonard for the boy's decision.

The one thing that does stay a secret is the second offer that Leonard receives from his old friend. Starfleet needs doctors; the current crisis may be over, but doctors are not immune to becoming casualties, and must be replaced along with soldiers, scientists, and diplomats. Leonard lets himself daydream during his shifts about shaking off the refinery dust, finding Joanna a better school, maybe reacquainting himself with some people who are doing more than ore extraction for a living. Still, he keeps his mouth shut. He knows damn well that "the current conflict" was just one part of Starfleet's ongoing "negotiations" with the Galaxy; more importantly, Jocelyn knows it too and is already making arrangements (ever the wise pessimist) that will cushion the blow of the next Federation conflict for Beta Arturi and its dependent colonies. Whatever his feelings about this world, he knows her well enough to see that she will not leave while things are unstable here; indeed, she would hardly be the woman he loves if she did. But as the situation improves, Leonard begins to allow himself hope for their family's future, somewhere better.

* * *

He bides his time until Joanna is almost eleven, then turns to Jocelyn one night in bed and asks what she'd think of moving around a bit.

"Might be nice to travel somewhere outside the mining colonies. Joanna's got to see more of the Galaxy eventually. Maybe we could even see some of those stars we passed on our honeymoon while I was getting friendly with the vacuum-operated space toilet — what do you think?"

He can't see her smile in the dark, but knows it's there from the tone of her voice.

"You mean you'd willingly get on another deep-space transport? When's the last time you've actually even been on a shuttle, Lenny?"

"But don't you think that there are places we could go that would be worth the trip?"

She switches on a light and stares at him like she's gotten intobed with a lunatic.

"What's this about, really? Because I can't remember the last time you talked about going on holiday."

He doesn't want to bring up Starfleet, sure that it'll upset Jocelyn more than he's even sure he wants to join up. Still...

"There are other reasons to travel. You must want Joanna to meet her family eventually — all those cousins and aunts..."

He knows instantly that he's said the wrong thing from the way she freezes up, so still even her shadow seems fixed on the sheets.

"You've — Leonard, tell me you haven't been talking to my uncle about this."

Because, as it turns out, there have recently been some pretty tense messages getting passed between Jocelyn and her uncle, via her mother, about "family responsibilities" and other such heavily loaded phrases.

"_Apparently_," Jocelyn says with gritted teeth, "my darling uncle views his contribution to our finances as more of an investment — one that he wants to see liquidated as soon as possible, preferably by a reordering of our lives. At least my mother genuinely wants to see Joanna, but I'd find it a lot more touching if she didn't talk about how much of a help I could be to her brother's company all the time. Funny how none of his own children want to work for him."

By the time Jocelyn has finished pouring out her resentment, Leonard can't bring himself to raise his intended topic, and tells himself he'll wait for a more opportune moment. Perhaps, he thinks, once things have smoothed over, she'll come around to seeing the benefits of joining the family business.

Before he can test this theory, though, a message arrives with what Leonard would have thought was serendipitous timing — that is, if it hadn't been relayed by an adenoidal middleman who also informed them of the latest shipping delay.

"And by the way, Ms. Treadway," the wheezy voice interjects in her closing remarks, "I thought you might like to know that the Federation department of colonization has been taking a great deal of interest in your work. It seems they've been looking for a better way to manage the colonial interests for a long time, and you could say you've, ahem, drawn their attention. Yes, I don't want to be premature, but I think you may be receiving some very interesting news from the Department soon."

Leonard stands out of sight behind her and freezes in a frenzy of speculation. It sounds suspiciously like Jocelyn is about to get offered the perfect job. The Federation may need doctors, but they will _want_ Jocelyn, want her power to organize and draw strength out of the places that can't be fought for with 'fleet ships. Old wheezy may be useless in an argument, but he has his ear to the ground; Jocelyn must have a job offer coming, and it won't just be anywhere, it'll be on Earth, maybe in Tokyo or Geneva. Never mind being beholden to her family, or being shipped out at the mercy of Starfleet, the couple finally, finally, has the prospects they need to pay their own way out of here. Leonard watches Jocelyn draw herself up and feels a fierce, proud happiness take hold of his heart.

"Thank you, Mr. Uzabi," she says, no hint of a reaction in her tone. That's my girl, thinks Leonard, sturdy as bricks under any news and ready to take on the Galaxy at the drop of a hat. By god, the things she's going to do with those bureaucrats. She's going to shake the very foundations of the system back home.

She flicks a hand and the screen turns off. A little of the stiffness leaves her spine. She glances over her shoulder to where Leonard stands and says wryly, "Well, so much for those apples."

Leonard just stands there, an enormous grin splitting his face. He doesn't know whether to shout it from the windows, or gather her up and kiss her till he can't breathe.

"Josie—" he starts.

She's staring at him with a startled, bewildered look. He tries again.

"Josie, do you know what this means?"

He can't seem to stop grinning, even as he feels like his cheeks might split open with the strain of it. She still hasn't said a word.

"My god! Josie, how can you be so calm at a time like this!"

"What do you — what do you think this changes, Len?"

"The department of colonization, Jocelyn! They've got a seat on the Federation Council! Don't you realize what a great chance this is?"

"A chance to do what, Leonard? Push papers — become one of these glorified file clerks" she gestures to the blank viewscreen "whose only concern is keeping things _under quota_? Why would I want to trade what I'm doing here for _that_?"

Leonard stares at her in disbelief. "Maybe because it would get us off this shit hole of a planet? Because we could put Joanna in a _school_, Josie, a _real school_, not some shed with two computers and a kid who could barely pass his teaching exams? Because we'd be on Earth, where the air doesn't stink, and people talk about something other than the latest ore processing unit? My god! What is there to _stay_ for?"

"What... We've got friends, _Joanna_ has friends, we have people who look after her when we're not around — do you really think you could drag her into a clinic or a hospital with you the way you do here?"

"No, of course not. Starfleet has after-school facilities, has proper _schools_ for that matter — she'd be looked after all the time."

"And what makes you think you could get a job with Starfleet Medical?" she scoffs.

He can't quite meet her eyes at that.

She answers her own question in a half-strangled tone. "That's what that was about, wasn't it? Last week, when you started talking about travel and adventure again — of course it was, I can't remember the last time you wanted to _travel_. That was about Starfleet, wasn't it? You honestly wanted to drag us off onto some starship, onto the front lines for all we know. My god, Leonard! Could you be any more irresponsible? You _know_ what happens to families out there."

"Out there? What about what happens here? Kids start working at 16 and never see anything of the Galaxy beyond the next four colonies. What kind of a life is that for Joanna?"

"It's our life! It's the life we've been building for our whole marriage. It's having people who support us and respect us and knowing we've accomplished something here. You want to throw that away?"

"Damn it, woman! What is there to throw away? You want to pretend this isn't still a backwater shit hole even after everything we've done? Do you want me to pretend it's ever going to be the same as the life we could have had on Earth if your uncle weren't such a selfish, hypocritical bastard? Do you want me to pretend we _planned_ to live like this, out in the godforsaken, ass-end of nowhere? I don't know what you want from me anymore!"

"I just don't understand! What do you want to do? Just pack up and leave?"

"Yes! Don't you think we've given enough to this place? Don't you think we deserve to get something out of it? Your uncle made a fortune out of his first business — we could do that, Josie, anyone would be happy to buy into the business now. We could do anything!"

"We could sell out, you mean. Find the nearest passing tradesman and sell out Beta Arturi to the highest bidder. If you really think, for one second, that I'm going to hand off my responsibilities to some ignorant, off-world... some profit-seeking _charlatan_..."

"I'm not saying that at all! You could find someone, you must know someone who could take it over — you don't have to be anchored here for the rest of our lives, do you?" The prospect looms with a kind of horror over his imagination.

Jocelyn looks taken aback by the idea, but seems to consider it.

"Maybe, if... there's the manager at gamma facility. He might — given a year or two... I'd have to..."

McCoy goggles at her. "A _year_? _Two_? I can't — Jocelyn, if you think I'm going to wait another year for you to get sick of this hellhole..."

"I'm not... I'll never get sick of this place. I don't want to go at all, I don't — I don't even understand why we're talking like this. I thought — it's been so long, and I thought this place was home. I don't know how you can talk about our home like this, Lenny. What's so bad about staying?"

They've come full circle now. Jocelyn sounds as lost and bewildered as when they started, except for an added layer of exhaustion over every word. Leonard realizes his throat has gone dry and sore from shouting. He slumps down on their sofa, puts his head in his hands. After a minute or two, Jocelyn moves to sit beside him, reaches out to touch his fingers, his temple, the back of his head, each time pulling back as if he were a wild animal she might startle.

"Leonard, I didn't know." Her voice now is soft, almost pleading. "We can talk. If you've... if you've been unhappy, maybe we can... We don't need to decide anything now. I don't even have the job offer yet."

He looks at her, hesitant and timid, so unlike herself, and draws her in with an arm around her shoulders. Neither of them has shed a tear; Jocelyn's breathing is even and rhythmic against his side. Joanna breezes in to find them sitting together, apparently normal, and chatters on blithely about her adventures.

* * *

It's only the start. The job offer does arrive, as promised, and Leonard can't seem to stop himself from starting the whole argument over again. This time it's even worse.

"Wait — what do you mean you already know that Starfleet will give you a job? What did you take 'I'll think about it' to mean, Lenny? That you should start sending out resumes?"

Telling her about the job offer that came alongside Cristoph's doesn't exactly smooth over the situation.

And then, the next time —

"...think you're being unreasonable! Doesn't mean anything to you that he's offering you a solid job at his company — probably even let you take over the business!"

"Oh, please, Leonard, tell me about _my_ family, why don't you? God knows you're such an authority!"

"Maybe would be if you talked about them once in a while! There's only so much I can get from total, goddamn _silence_!"

"Well, I'm sorry if I didn't answer the questions you _never asked_! Or did you just not notice when they stopped even sending cards for her birthday!"

Joanna is luckily not around for that one, but careful as they try to be, the arguments flare up when she's in the next room, or just outside. Even during the temporary cease fires, she knows something is amiss, and her shoulders tense the slightest bit whenever she's in the room with both of them.

And the arguing... the arguing just goes on. It's like their early days of marriage all over again, only now they're turning all their anger and stubbornness against each other, instead of against the Federation mouthpieces who were light-years away. Contained within one room, the emotion is stifling. Leonard can't get past the bewildered frustration that tells him they should be fighting on the same side, the deep conviction that they must, surely, want the same thing.

One day he slams a Starfleet contract down on their kitchen table, saying, "Give me one good reason, Josie — one thing to stay for, one other option that won't leave me rotting in this hell hole twenty years from now."

The contract lies on the table long enough that Leonard's fingers start twitching to sign it. It looks more and more like the way out, like maybe the only way to get through Jocelyn's stubbornness is to break them both out of this pattern.

After the fifth (fiftieth?) time rehashing the same exchange, Leonard announces that he's taken the offer from Starfleet, come what may. Jocelyn sucks in a long breath, and says, "we'll miss you."

Which is when it hits him, at last. Somewhere in the back of his head, Leonard's been thinking that, whatever happened, at least they'd be headed in the same direction, and if Starfleet wasn't ideal, at least it would get both of them away from here. Only now he gets it, and he really wishes he could've figured this out sooner, like maybe before he'd signed his life away to the goddamn 'fleet, that something between them was going to break first.

And then, with a sick wrench that he can feel in his gut, he realizes that there's worse to come — because the whole time he's been thinking he and Josie would be together no matter what, he never even gave a thought to the idea that he might lose Joanna. Because it's been bad enough that he and Jocelyn are both losing her a little bit with every fight, but this — this is unthinkable.

He fights for Joanna in the courtroom like he's never fought for anything before, even as she glares mutinously at him from across the aisle. They've been through tears and bitter silences that tear at his heart and it's not even any comfort to know that Jocelyn's getting the same treatment. He can only think, desperately, that if he can just get custody, Joanna will have to forgive him eventually — and even if things are broken past mending with Jocelyn, at least he'll be able to take care of his baby girl.

Except it doesn't work out like that at all. The judge seems to be just the latest in a long line of people who take Leonard's choice of Starfleet as a personal affront. And as if that weren't enough, the judge's whole family comes from a nearby colony that wouldn't have escaped famine without Jocelyn's personal intervention. He takes all of ten minutes to deliberate before awarding full custody to Jocelyn, with visiting rights for Leonard only provided he doesn't try to take Joanna off-world at any point. Then the judge invites Jocelyn, her lawyer, and _Leonard's lawyer_ back home with him for dinner.

Leonard appeals, of course.

This time, the judge is a woman whose family was nearly destroyed by its involvement in the Aiera Mining Conglomerate. Jocelyn gave them all jobs after the company's collapse.

Leonard writes to his friend at Starfleet Medical, asking if there are any other sources of legal advice he can draw on. The finest legal minds in the Federation (or, whoever could be bothered to look over a divorce case for a recruit who hasn't even shown up yet) send back a long opinion about independent courts that boils down to, "you're screwed." By the second appeal, with no funds left, no hint of a change in the custody decision, and a lawyer who walks out on him halfway through the opening remarks, Leonard is finally forced to agree.

Bitterer than all the biased judges in the world is the fact that Joanna has completely stopped speaking to him. She isn't speaking to either of her parents, actually, though Leonard thinks she may be reserving the most hurt looks for him. He's tried to explain why he's leaving, but then he could hardly explain it to Jocelyn, so he doesn't know how to begrudge Joanna her confused resentment.

* * *

It's almost two weeks after the final decision before he can get a shuttle back to Earth. He spends those sleepless nights at the clinic, on a spare cot jammed into his office where Joanna's crib used to stand. It's something he's only had to do a handful of times before, and only then if a patient was too critically ill to be left without supervision. Before those harrowing weeks, the longest he's ever slept at the clinic was during the five nights it took Cristoph, sitting silent watch over his aunt, to let her go.

Now that Leonard's committed to leaving, all he can think about is staying. It seems so impossible now to imagine that he ever really thought Jocelyn would leave with him, that he wonders bleakly if Starfleet was his way, not of forcing her to leave, but of forcing himself. It's difficult, watching small lights flick on and off in the darkened clinic, not to come up with ways that he _could_ stay, ways that he could make the short walk back from the clinic and be home again. It's difficult, at two, three o'clock in the morning, to remind himself that each one leads back to arguments, to bitterness, and to the unavoidable fact that he has been unhappy.

His replacement shows up at the clinic a few nerve-wracking days late and nods along earnestly through McCoy's brief introduction to frontier medicine.

"So _young_," thinks Leonard, but then he and Jocelyn were even younger, starting out...

The young doctor gets flustered when Jocelyn and Joanna show up, silent and sombre, at the clinic.

"Come on," Jocelyn says, "we'll walk you over to the shuttle."

Joanna, arms crossed and mouth quivering, says nothing the whole way to the landing strip. She lets him hug her before he boards, but it takes seemingly endless minutes before a bit of the tension leaves her, and she rests her forehead against his shoulder.

"JoJo," he says, and she doesn't even object to the baby name. "JoJo, you gotta know I love you more than anything in the world, okay? Okay, baby girl?"

He keeps saying it, over and over, until the pilot coughs, awkward and apologetic, to remind him that it's time to leave now. He hates the shuttle pilot to an unreasonable degree then, clutching Joanna in his arms and hoping desperately to hear the sound of her voice over the engines.

Then somehow he tears himself away, and spends the next two weeks strapped to a bulkhead, vomiting and drinking. It's a nice change of pace.

As he staggers off the transport at the San Francisco docks, Leonard gets a brief glimpse of his future in the form of the giant tin cans being constructed around him. He can't help thinking about his wife ("my _ex_-wife — took half the damn planet in the divorce") and the fact that she was probably right about just how smart this is as a career move. He heads straight for the toilet on the next shuttle, wishing for the space-sickness bag she'd slipped unobtrusively into his luggage, the one he'd had to use before they even finished take off from Beta Arturi. And then, as he informs some fresh-faced young recruit (well, maybe not so fresh-faced, but, god, _young_) that Leonard is probably about to vomit on his shoes, he thinks about the few words his daughter had finally whispered into his jacket as he let her go.

_...hate you. Don't go._

Welcome to Starfleet, Dr. McCoy.


End file.
